Output details

Unfinished Business – A Contemporary Response to William Bell Scott

Practitioner leadership and exhibition facilitation combine in Dorsett’s well-established use of fine art as experimental museology. His pioneering exhibition-making at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum began long before the 1990s groundswell of museum-oriented art projects (Putnam 2001 cites 145 museum-as-medium works from that decade in comparison to only 48 from the previous twenty years). Dorsett’s output 'Unfinished Business' transferred this experimentalism to a popular National Trust property utilising extensive studio work completed during his 2010 sabbatical. http://unfinishedbusinessatwallington.weebly.com/

Using high-resolution same-size photographs of long-silent musical instruments from the Ashmolean Museum, Dorsett’s Rainer-like over-drawings were mounted horizontally beneath long-redundant banqueting silver, referencing a semiotically-charged medieval 'spur on a plate' depicted in the nearby Northumbrian history murals painted by the Pre-Raphaelite Bell Scott (whose bicentenary prompted the Trust, supported by their ACE-funded arts coordinator Tom Freshwater, to invite and fund Dorsett). This table-top installation is a form of curatorial sense-making that inspired the train-table conversations about genetic archives filmed for Dorsett’s installation in ‘Extraordinary Renditions: the cultural negotiation of science’, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013). http://vimeo.com/album/2549219 http://vimeo.com/75586281

Influenced by the museum storeroom handling procedures discussed in ‘Things and Theories’ (Output 3, Identifier 1530), Dorsett's ‘lead-artist’ table intervention initiated museological markers for the 25 exhibitors whose artworks (60+) Dorsett negotiated into Wallington’s house and gardens at different stages during the 4-month exhibition period. This durational process (involving many artist-Trust briefings and presentations) created a sense of ‘unfinished business’ around Bell Scott’s incomplete murals using, for example, ‘angry’ London Stuckist portraits, ‘ironic’ Postmodern watercolours, and other contemporary re-visions of 19C art.

The concept of curated tables also featured in Dorsett's keynote 'At a Moment’s Notice, According to the Pleasure of the Holder', DeSForM, Jiangnan University, China. http://desform2013.id.tue.nl/conference/keynotes/